Howto make a liquid-cooled desk PC

Our ideas often start out with a simple premise. About a year ago, I first came to Anthony with a plan to build a computer into the structure of a desk. A quick bit of brainstorming determined that there were essentially two ways to accomplish this: old-school (a classic oak executive's desk with components hidden behind false backs in the drawers); and new-school (transparent surfaces with components on display). The old-school approach was classy and definitely appealing (we won't rule it out for the future), but the new-school approach was both less practical and more ostentatious, which made it our natural choice.

So we specced out a totally visible PC. The components—motherboard, graphics card, hard drives, etc.—would all be mounted beneath the surface of a transparent desk. Because an optical mouse would have trouble tracking on a clear surface, we imagined an integrated clear trackpad that would turn part of the desktop into a pointing device..